It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

Charles Darwin

The Center for Human Evolutionary Studies (CHES) at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, constitutes one of the world’s leading research, teaching and student training programs in the evolution of human behavior. Our strengths lie in our multidisciplinary approach to this study, our distinguished faculty and research associates, and our highly competitive graduate and undergraduate students, including a number of foreign students from countries in which some of our research pro jects are based. We also enjoy privileged access to some of the world’s premier fossil localities for the investigation of the fossilized remains and archaeological traces of our early human ancestors.

As a top-ranked public research university, Rutgers is unique in having strengths in all aspects of human evolutionary studies. The university’s commitment to the center’s multidisciplinary explorations of human evolution is demonstrated through its strong support of the center’s research and training programs in five areas within paleoanthropology and the biological study of modern humans and other primates:

• Prehistoric archaeology
• Human paleontology
• Paleoenvironmental studies
• Primatology
• The biological basis of human behavior

CHES research has major implications for understanding the roots of humanity and for defining what it means to be human. Our investigation of ancient human ancestors and our closest living relatives are teaching us when and why our distinctive anatomical and behavioral traits evolved. Our studies of modern humans are demonstrating the biological basis of the complex patterns of social behavior we exhibit.